EVENTS

$140 per day

A religious court in Israel has fined a woman $140 each day that her one-year-old son remains uncircumcised. The Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem has reportedly rejected an appeal from the woman, who is currently going through a divorce and whose husband insists the procedure be carried out.

Rabbinical courts in Israel have jurisdiction in Jewish religious matters, including marriage and divorce. However, the woman’s lawyer reportedly argued that the court does not have the authority to demand the circumcision. According to +972 Magazine, there is no legal requirement for parents to have their sons circumcised.

What??

A religious court can require people to mutilate their infant’s genitals and fine them daily if they refuse? How does that even work?

Making the decision against circumcision is a controversial one in Israel. Circumcision has been an important Jewish tenet for millenia, and for the religious, it symbolises a covenant with God.

No doubt it does, but how can sane contemporary people try to require anyone to cut off a bit of their infant’s penis because it symbolizes a covenant with god? Both parts are baffling – the mutilation part and the covenant with a fictional character part.

“Rabbinical courts in Israel have jurisdiction in Jewish religious matters” but does that include requiring everyone to be religious in the first place?

This may be the first time in my life that I’ve read a news story and asked myself, “Huh. I wonder how the Men’s Rights Movement is dealing with this story?” Because seriously, the cognitive dissonance this will create should be EPIC.

The story is confusing, but what is clear to me is that the reason the religious court got involved was because the parents were in disagreement. The court has no authority to force circumcision of its own initiative, but here one parent wants it done and the conflict may be one of several between a couple undergoing divorce. In Israel the rabbinate has jurisdiction over Jewish divorces, and that’s how they got involved in enforcing their way on one of the matters about which the couple was in disagreement.

But it gets harder and harder every single fucking day. So yes, I think I will be following this closely, because it will indeed finally provide an answer to that question: is Israel a theocracy or a democracy?

@freemage, #6:
This story isn’t the first I’ve seen where rights are being trampled on that relate solely to men and boys. The MRM will ignore it to go screech at women because they aren’t a movement about rights, only about harassment.